It’s not exactly an easy task to prep your house for a storm that threatens to temporarily put civilization on pause. What do you do? Board it up and hope those two-by-fours stop a tree from rocketing through your bay window while gale force winds rip off your roof? Put up a sandbag wall and optimistically conclude, “That’ll stop the ocean.”?

There aren’t a lot of great options. Chances are that if your house is in the path of a hurricane you’re going to come home to a swampy toilet of a home that you’ll have to chase alligators and possums out of. But you’ve got to try, right? You’d feel like a big jerk if you didn’t at least go through the motions of hurricane prep.

So then it’s hard to give this homeowner much crap, because hey, this has got to be better than nothing. But also, is it?

It appears the goal here is to keep the roof on, mostly. Maybe they think the house has a chance of blowing away altogether. Who knows. It’s an admirable effort but it feels unlikely that some straps are going to keep a house in place if Hurricane Florence decides to be a real bitch. A nifty life hack is nice and all but 150 MPH wind is 150 MPH wind. If God wants your house to go away, it’s going to not be there in the morning.

In truth, though, this homeowner’s effort deserves to be rewarded. This family deserves to come back to their neighborhood and find that theirs is the only home that hasn’t been obliterated. Then the husband can smugly tell the neighbors, “Told ya Gary, you better tie your house down but you didn’t listen did ya?” That said, knowing the luck of hurricane afflicted cities lately what’s more likely to happen is that a sinkhole opens up right underneath the house and when the family gets back all that will be there are the straps.